Jaclyn Engelman explained meteor showers called Leonids. Paul Kleinman talked about analyzing U.S. census data. Joshua Ladau described the peculiar mating habits of crickets. All three are 18-year-old undergraduate freshmen doing paid, sometimes graduate-level research at Cornell University.

And all three held captive an audience of the Cornell Board of Trustees open session March 27, as they described, with honesty and erudition, research work that keeps them busy as researchers for five to 12 hours a week, outside their regular course work. "When I applied to Cornell, I never thought I would get into research this early on," Kleinman, of Brooklyn, N.Y., told the trustees.

The students are the first enrollees in a year-old program called the Presidential Research Scholars Program, designed to help recruit the best and brightest undergraduate students with special research opportunities and financial support. At present 53 students are involved in the program, and they have earned $30,000 doing 5,000 hours of research. This fall another 75 will be recruited, ultimately leading to a full complement of 300 undergraduate researchers.

The students do their extracurricular projects throughout their four years at Cornell, working closely with faculty mentors on research projects. The young researchers represent all seven undergraduate colleges, with 24 men and 29 women, Janiece Bacon Oblak, assistant dean of admissions, told the trustees. The pay for the research, she said, "is a wonderful reward for their interest in research."

Cornell believes, said President Hunter Rawlings, that in order to compete for the best students with the best universities in the country, "the key for us is going to be connection to a cutting-edge research faculty member who is doing work in a discipline that freshmen can begin to enter into from the time they set foot on campus."

The three freshman researchers left no doubt that they are well in control of their material:

• Jaclyn Engelman, a graduate of Cumberland Valley High School in Mechanicsburg, Pa., is interested in meteor showers called the Leonids and has been working with Michael Kelley, professor of electrical engineering, to study the meteors and the luminous trails they leave behind. She plans to create a star map of the night sky in Puerto Rico for easier identification of photographic data.
• Paul Kleinman, a graduate of Edward R. Murrow High School in Brooklyn, N.Y., has interests in urban issues, government, politics and design. Working with William Goldsmith, professor and director of urban and regional studies, he is researching the links between automobile pollution and urban sprawl. He is also investigating the relationship between these links and racial segregation in the inner city.
• Joshua Ladau, a graduate of South Eugene High School, Eugene, Ore., placed 11th in the Westinghouse Talent Search last year. He is working with several faculty members on research into the distribution of stick insects' eggs. He is preparing his extensive research on crickets in the Cascade mountains for publication.

The trustees were particularly interested in why the three freshman researchers had chosen Cornell. Entomologist Ladau said he asked his high school counselors where he should go to school. "They said Cornell, hands down," he told the audience. Engelman said that the financial program was a major attraction. But Kleinman won the most applause for his explanation of his decision. "Cornell is Cornell," he said.